T Minus Kid

I found an interesting article today on one of my favorite web sites, io9.com. The article, titled “What’s the Price of Fatherhood? Time, Money, and Testosterone.”, is about the hormonal impact of fatherhood. It turns out that fatherhood not only drains you of money, sleep, and your free time, it also drains you of your manly fuel. Great. All I have left are my blood, breath, and that last, frazzled nerve.

Yes More Mr. Nice Guy

From the article: “raising a child requires much less male-to-male competition, and much more partner-to-partner cooperation — not to mention other responsibilities that can conflict with the courting-and-mating-related activities driven by testosterone. This is a conclusion drawn by past research which shows that fathers, as a group, tend to have lower testosterone levels than non-fathers.”

As an older dad my testosterone level is probably getting a double-whammy from fatherhood and also being 40-hurphmurph years old. This likely explains why after a full day of work followed by a full evening of managing a raging Little Hop, sometimes I prefer to just sleep with my wife.

I’m Losing It!

So, Hop Dads, before you get too depressed about this news, understand there may be a valuable benefit to the decrease in T. You’re less likely to react violently when your two-year-old is squeezing ketchup into the cats’ water fountain, or throwing a crying fit because you put a red straw into her soda can instead of a blue one, or flushing an entire roll of toilet paper… again.

In other words, lower levels of testosterone in fathers might be the reason why two-year-olds live past the age of two.